The Ultimate Guide to Sales Enablement
Sales enablement encompasses a lot of different things from enabling salespeople to helping marketing. Sales enablement is easily confused with marketing and sales operations but is an entirely different thing with a very distinct goal from operations and marketing. With this all-encompassing entity things can get confusing with what sales enablement is as well as what it isn’t. Below is the ultimate guide to sales enablement to get everything straight from what sales enablement encompasses, and what types of technology are used. If you’re looking to learn about sales enablement, with this guide you will no longer have confusion about what this process is and all the benefits it brings.
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is a process where the strengths of people and technology are merged to create an optimized system to increase sales. More specifically it is the optimization of sales teams through training, providing them the knowledge they need, as well as optimizing their workflow through technology. Sales enablement also aims to facilitate cooperation amongst divisions of the sales department from the sales team, marketing, and operations. Open dialog between the divisions enables a streamlined infrastructure that leads to greater success. Overall sales enablement is the process of enabling salespeople and marketing to focus more on the things that matter and have to tools to do their job well.
What does Sales Enablement include?
Sales enablement includes many areas and strategies to improve workflow. This includes onboardings, training, workshops, technology, tools, as well as management types. Onboarding, training, and workshops work by getting the employees in the same headspace and aimed toward the same goal. This is vital to create a prosperous corporation where the values across different departments have goals that align. With aligned goals sales enablement then targets inefficiencies which is where technology and tools come into play. These often include automation technology to decrease the amount of time doing the same task over and over again or tools to make existing processes easier. With aligned goals, and tools to succeed the last thing is to create new management methodologies that are focused on increasing buyer satisfaction. Customer Relationship Management is a methodology of looking at the customer interaction outcomes and adjusting management to better these interactions. With happy customers and efficient employees, the business is set to increase sales and be more profitable.
What kinds of technology are used?
Technology for sales varies from analytics to automation. These are key ways in which businesses have grown and been able to keep up with more and more people to account for. For sales enablement however, these same kinds of technologies are used to make salespeople and marketers more efficient with their time. One key technology used by sales enablement is automation. Automation is the process of taking mundane repetitive tasks that occur automatically. This can be as simple as having an automatic response to the customer which gives the representative more time to look at the question and give a better response. In addition to automation, analytics are often utilized to understand where inefficiencies are and how to go about mending them.
Overall sales enablement is just as important to a working business as any other sort of quality improvement department. Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) cycles that many are used to with quality improvement are embodied by sales enablement. Through investigating shortcomings or areas of improvement sales enablement is then able to create actionable plans to mend these. Through the implementation of training, technology, and tools; sales enablement allows for improved efficiency. No matter the scale or size of a business sales enablement is able to help in getting the ball rolling within a sales department. By making the people within a business better and providing them the tools to succeed is what leads to better sales.
